The Carbon Diet is open source!

Well, I finally got round to it. The Carbon Diet is now open source software, under the Affero GPL v3 license. This means you can download and improve the code, and get it uploaded onto the site! You could even install your own copy on another server, and make any changes you like as long as you release the source code to your changed version.

I was waiting until I'd tidied the code so that it wasn't embarrassing any more, but then decided that was never going to happen, so I've gone ahead just done it. There's lots of work to do - 72 issues on the list - but now that it's open source, if you'd like to help make it better, I'd love to have you on board :)

The developer area is linked from the site in numerous places (the "code" tab at the top, for instance), or you can just follow this link straight to github to get the code.

Earth Day 2009

Today was Earth Day, which is always fun. However, today was a bit more fun, as the Carbon Diet got covered on CNET. According to the article, "You'll learn a lot from Carbon Diet. It's the best carbon calculator I've seen", which is a pretty good present for Earth Day!

Because of that, there's been a fair amount of new traffic today - Hi to all our new users! I've upgraded the server it's running on the cope with the increase in load, so hopefully it will stay reasonably quick...

The Carbon Diet goes to Ireland

Well, OK, we're not actually going to Ireland, but we do now have data for Ireland in there, so if you've been waiting for that, then your time has come!

Apologies if it's been a bit quiet on the development front this last year - having a child seems to have wiped out all my time, somehow :)

However, there have been some minor updates happening quietly. If you have a CurrentCost electricity monitor, I've written some software to upload the data into the Carbon Diet, which is pretty cool - it's still in development, but contact me if you want to have a go.

Also, I've started rearranging the site to a more modern code layout. The first area to be affected is flights. You shouldn't notice much of a difference, apart from the added bonus that now you get a nice map of your flights, with line thickness showing carbon impact. This is part of a expansion of the analysis tools that I am trying to do, which will add things like individual analysis graphs for each account type, which should be useful for looking at things in detail.

Press coverage, and a question

Hello everyone. Firstly, I thought I'd let you know that the Carbon Diet got a little writeup in the CAT newsletter, Clean Slate. I did a talk about it at the members conference in August, and it was one of the ones which got written up in the magazine, so that's nice.

Secondly, I have a question for you all. Since I've been tracking my petrol usage on the Carbon Diet, I have realised that in the last 6 months, I have only used 3 tanks of fuel. The car is a 2-seater, basically just for me, no use for the family, and these days I never use it. I spent more on tax, insurance and servicing than fuel in the whole of the last year. It hardly seems worth having it.

So, considering I live out in the countryside where the buses don't run at useful times, commute just once a week to the station 10 miles away, but want to be able to go 20 miles to Guildford and back reasonably quickly from time to time without leaving my wife without a car, what can I replace my car with that is more environmentally friendly? Ideas, anyone?

Newest Carbon Dieter

If it's been a bit quieter than normal around here recently, there is a pretty good reason. On 4th February, my baby daughter Amelia was born. The whole family is doing well, and adjusting to the new presence around the house. However, it might be a while until I get back to coding in my spare time!

It should be interesting to see the effect on my carbon footprint ;)

Server move completed

Well, the server move didn't take as long as I expected! I managed to get it all done yesterday, including the forum, so that's great. It should be substantially faster now, for rather technical reasons which I won't go into...

If anyone notices anything at all strange about the site since yesterday, please let me know.

Server Move

Oops - the server issues we had the other have also affected the forum, and I forgot to fix it. It should have fixed itself, but seems not to have done, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

However, there are bigger things afoot. The Carbon Diet is going to move servers (intentionally this time), to a new virtual server system from Slicehost. This should make the site faster, as well as dealing with a whole load of problems that I've had for a while. The forum system will be fixed during this move, but of course the Carbon Diet itself will have to go offline for a little while as well. The move will be done this week at some point, so I apologise if you get a "check back later" message at some point. I will keep the downtime to a minimum, hopefully no more than a couple of hours.

There are some other reasons for the server move as well, but I'm not making those public just yet... wait and see!